About

My name is Kieran and to say I have a passion for all things nerdy is an understatement.

I’m a full time nerd and work for an awesome specialist software development company based at Fort Dunlop in Birmingham, UK. When I’m not there you’ll find me being a sysadmin managing servers, developing weird and wonderful scripts and websites, chicken keeping, trying my luck at home improvements, gardening, rebuilding nitro RC cars, tuning two and four stroke engines…

As you can guess from above I’ll pretty much turn my hand to anything and love learning new things, with a tiny passion for PHP and developing in general I believe that most of life’s problems can be solved with a bit of code and maybe a cheeky graph.

Where did it all start?

Briefly, my passion for computers started at a young age, it started with tinkering, taking them apart and rebuilding them. In my teens I started exploring websites and how to host them, I soon got into all sorts of Linux operating systems and server grade hardware, soon after I built my own hosting infrastructure and here we are… 6 years later with a fair amount of experience picked up along the way, I have a solid hosting platform built upon 2 colocated VMware servers, 2 cloud servers and way too many servers at home used for testing!

Home Network

My home network is pretty cool, infact you can see it below via a live webcam (did you expect anything less?):

Housed in an Ikea lack table, taking pride of place below the 24 port patch panel is a 24 port TP-Link gigabit switch, just beneath that is an 8 port Edimax PoE switch and finally a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite just beneath that.

The patch panel uses 3 main types of ethernet cable – red for PoE power, green for video and purple for general data. You will also notice 2 blue cables which connect the switches together.

At the very bottom on the floor you will see the servers which I use for local testing, I’m very much a fan of Dell’s PowerEdge range but have also collected some HP’s along the way.

Connected out of sight is a 1350VA CyberPower UPS, a Zyxel router as an access point, 3 NAS drives, a raspberry pi for home automation, a custom built server and another Dell PowerEdge tower amongst other hoarded hardware.

Are you still about?

I am! Life has gotten pretty busy recently so I don’t get to spend as much time on my websites as I would like to, but I’m still around!